Watch just about any modern piece of entertainment set in ancient Rome—think Gladiator, or Spartacus—and you’re likely to notice something: Just about everybody, from emperors to house slaves, is white and European.
That’s one of several pervasive modern myths about the Roman Empire. In fact, the empire was far more diverse, a society formed by the people, goods and ideas of three different continents. And the people in that society had a surprising amount of opportunity for advancement and social mobility, irrespective of their race. Nandini Pandey, a UW-Madison associate professor in the Department of Classical & Ancient Near Eastern Studies, has built her career on upending myths like this.
Through her classroom work and research, Pandey is trying to rewrite the narrative of classics to more accurately reflect ancient Rome’s true cultural openness and ethnic pluralism. She strives to take ancient texts on their own terms and to unthink modern assumptions about race and “western civilization” that have historically informed the study of classics.
“There’s so little that survives from antiquity,” Pandey says. “We have to make creative and thoughtful use of evidence try to zoom in on those moments when there are discrepancies between the evidence and our assumptions. I’m really interested in finding those moments that explode the standard narrative.”
Pandey found her way into classics via an unexpected path. The oldest child of Indian immigrants who settled in Poughkeepsie, New York, she seemed destined for a career in engineering, a field chosen by both of her parents. Literature offered a different path. Pandey was reading C.S. Lewis at age 7, adding in J.R.R. Tolkien and Tolstoy shortly thereafter. In her first year of college, she fell in love with Latin, which eventually led her to the famous quote from Cicero, the famed Roman orator, that informs both her teaching and her research today: “To remain ignorant of the past is to remain always a child.”
Pandey’s current project is her second book, Diversity and Difference in Imperial Rome. She plans to use texts and artifacts from early imperial Rome to examine ethnic mingling in the ancient Mediterranean world, as compared with today.
“Romans were really successful at managing an empire that gave opportunity and legal equality to people of different languages and cultures,” says Pandey. “I want to tell the positive side of the story—how did Romans manage to hold together this pluralistic society, and what can we learn from it to improve our idea of diversity?”
Stories—some of the oldest in the world—help Pandey paint a truer picture of ancient Rome. She points to two of the dominant origin stories of Rome—Virgil’s Aeneid, and the Romulus and Remus story—as evidence of Rome’s expansive multiculturalism. The former tells the story of Aeneas’s escape from the Trojan War and his efforts to found Rome from several disparate cultures, while the latter involves Romulus’s attempt to build and populate a city from scratch.
“Their foundation stories are all about assimilation and inclusion,” she says. “They’re about a Rome whose strength is based on its ability to learn and adapt customs, beliefs and languages from other cultures.”
Pandey’s trying to unthink the strong associations our modern society has fostered between class and race and culture. Romans, by contrast, grasped the notion of fortune in life—that it was possible to go from being a king to a conquered slave in the span of a week.
“They understood that there wasn’t any intrinsic worth that correlated with your station in life. You could be a slave from anywhere,” she says.
“I want to think really hard about how we think about merit and race in our country. How much of your fate is locked in by what your race is and where you happen to be born?”
Pandey wants to consider all of this in relation to hot-button modern issues, from affirmative action to health care access and partisan gerrymandering.
“I want to think really hard about how we think about merit and race in our country. How much of your fate is locked in by what your race is and where you happen to be born? I want my chapters to engage with current issues.”
Pandey was recently one of a pair of UW-Madison professors to win 2019 fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), an organization charged with expanding the reach and impact of the humanities. She’ll use the grant money to work on her book. As a woman of color in a field historically dominated by white men, she’s keenly aware she has even more opportunities—and, perhaps, responsibility—to bust myths about the ancient past. It’s what drives her to write about classics’ connections to modern culture for websites like Eidolon.
“Classics needs to survive,” says Pandey. “And to survive, it needs to reach out. It needs to stay relevant and pull more people into the fold. Through a constant critical engagement with modernity, I hope to refresh the field. It’s a new direction that isn’t often tried.”